Geocoding Flickr photos & other idle occupations

Stretchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Today is a holiday in the Netherlands and I took the day off (well, most of the day, there was a story on GE Papaya and what it has done to the Hawaiian papaya market to post.) Other than that, a day of playing with the boys and pursuing idle thoughts and interests:

–I noted that saying “Hawaiian Papaya” out loud does funny things to your face.
–I put together a graphic for the “The debate about climate change is over” campaign and then decided it was obvious depressing and sucky.
–But I had fun learning how to create flaming letters in photoshop and twisting and distorting text. I’m officially nuts about Good-Tutorials.com
–Doon taught me the proper steps for the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly of a B-Daman–Marth and I talked about installing a new pump and filter in the fish pond, but it was a cold and drizzly day and we moped out the window
–I added a daily update on news about squid to my RSS news feed.
–Finally found the article on building smarter to-do lists at 43 Folders which I originally read in Make Magazine. Whole lot of sense here.
–I geotagged some of my photos on Flickr so you can see the precise location they were taken.
–I set up a store over at Cafepress selling t-shirts and various items dedicated to irradicating apostrophe abuse
–I read a bit from my current book, a despairingly mediocre potboiler trying to be literature, Shadow of the Wind
–Went O boy O boy when I saw that Anthony Lane was reviewing the Da Vinci Code in the New Yorker, and cheated by reading it online rather than waiting for my copy in the post. Howlingly funny.
–I updated some of my Del.icio.us bookmarks–I downloaded the match schedule for the world cup to post on the refrigerator and was dissappointed to see that the luck of the groupings means a US-Iran game is nearly impossible, except in the unlikely event that both teams make the semi-finals. Ha.
–Tried to explain the World Cup to Doon. He wanted to know what team Beckham will play for, and what happens if he ends up playing against his own teammates. He’s not accepting that Dutch team Ajax doesn’t play in the World Cup.
–HawAIian PapAYa. HAwaiian PApaya. HawaIIan PapaYA.
–Right now I want desperately to figure out why WordPress’s Add URL link opens in a tiny unresizeable window that’s smaller than the fill in fields it contains and which clears the clipboard into which you’ve just copied your link. Agro-vating. Update: Fix for the window size problem found here!
–Noodled around a bit on the guitar, which I NEVER do anymore.
So all that was fun. Hope tomorrow’s weather is better so I can get some real work done.

I love what photoshop does, hate their pricing. Insane amount of money. Before I got bit by the MUST-HAVE-FULL-FEATURED-PROFESSIONAL-PACKAGE virus, I used Lview for many years. Dead simple, but with lots of stuff under the hood to grow with you as you progress. Highly recommend it, and animations is actually one of the things it does *better* than Photoshop/imageready — or at least it puts the task before you more intuitively. Until my morning started with opening Photoshop and I had a processor fast enough to keep it open all day, I used to run Lview for small graphic tasks as it loaded up about a squillion times faster than potatochop. Shareware.

The weather absolutely sucked yesterday, so I can see why you were so bored 😉

Love the CafePress shop! The whole apostrophe thing drives me NUTS. I’ve noticed that lots of people don’t use apostrophes these days; I asked about it once on a blog, and the answer was that it evolved from people being lazy on instant messaging. Unfortunately, it spread to blogs — argh!!!! What’s even worse is the people who can’t find their shift key at all and have blog entries like this:

Speaking of Photoshop, I have an image editing program question for you. I’m too cheap to buy Photoshop, so I found a knockoff of it called PhotoLine 32. It’s shareware, so I’m trying it out for 30 days, but it’s hardly user-friendly. Do you know anything about it? I’m entertaining myself trying to make animated gifs, but it isn’t going too well.

I’ve been lucky to have worked and volunteered for Greenpeace for 30+ years as a rabble rouser, pirate and culture hacker, allowing me to combine my love of technology, globally people-powered trouble-making, hippy do-goodery, and boats.
I’m Brian Fitzgerald and these thoughts, words, and opinions are mine, mine, mine.